


And They Won't Clip Your Wings

by lyonet



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: F/F, Past Torture, Post-Movie 2: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-09-14 04:27:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16906095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyonet/pseuds/lyonet
Summary: "I saved you," Leta said. "I wasn’t expecting to argue about it afterwards.”





	1. Chapter 1

_And they won't clip your wings_  
In cages, cages  
  
And I miss you more  
When I know you can fly to me  
Not inside these walls anymore 

\- Emma Louise, ‘Cages’

 

Once upon a time there was a girl in a cage.

There had been a place before the cage, a place where she was always warm and light filtered down through the jungle canopy so that it patterned her skin with a hundred shades of green, the first scales she had ever worn. But she did not think about before. There was only the cage, and she could not get out.

There was always a man outside the cage. The men changed, but the things they said were always the same. They called her beautiful, and then they stabbed at her with long sticks, never getting too close. She bit them on principle, if they did, though she would pay for it later.

Years passed, and there was only the cage.

There were other acts in the circus. The Kappa had chattered all the time at first, raging against its captors, but then the men in red coats hung a cage of fire fairies above its tank so that little sparks were forever falling on its wet, sensitive skin, and it was not long before the flood of furious Japanese dulled to the painful quiet of endurance. Other captives never resigned themselves. The Cornish pixies were in their cage less than a week before they broke out in the middle of a show and went wild on the crowd. It was a wonderful sight, watching them tear at the hair and clothes of screeching purebloods, hanging the circus master upside down so that coins jingled out of his pockets and his wand fell beneath the stampeding feet of escaping sight-seers. The circus left town that night and never came back.

Then there was the Rusalka, another creature of water, another beautiful girl for the crowds to goggle over. They made her sing every night, until her voice was hoarse and raw. The girl in the cage clung to the bars and whispered, _Hold on, you will get used to it, hold on_ , but the Rusalka was of the river and could not be kept dammed for long. She tried to run, and when the circus master drew his wand, the Rusalka stepped in front of a bus.

The girl in the cage sank to the floor and wept soundlessly for such brave stupidity, for the friend she had lost and the freedom she could barely remember.

There was only the cage.

Years passed, and then the  men in red coats brought in a new act: a boy, all hunched up on himself like an old man, with eyes as black as a stormcloud. He had scars on his back from beatings, old scars, layered on top of one another, and he was already so thin. But he looked at Nagini and he smiled like he knew secrets, and he whispered, “I’m Credence. Who are you?”

She gripped the bars between them and said, “Nagini.”

 

*

 

Credence had hope. There was nothing in the world half so infectious as that.

When he said “We’re getting out of here,” Nagini had no reason to believe him, but she wanted to very badly, so she did. And they did get out. They brought down the circus in flames and Nagini felt  like singing, like screaming, like opening her mouth and tasting all that pure,  pure  blood.

But the point was to run away,  and they did – hand in hand like children, shoes splashing through the wet streets of a midnight city. When at last they stopped, Nagini was giddy. She threw her arms around Credence’s neck and held on tight to him, and he held on to her; they laughed and they spun together in the shadows, and  it was almost like being safe.

Credence had hope. There was nothing in the world half so dangerous.

He was looking for his mother. The woman who had left the scars on his back was dead and gone, left buried in rubble in New York; now he was looking for the woman who had  given him away . Nagini was not sure what he was going to do when he found her. This hope was such a fierce, fragile thing – it was  a knife’ s edge  from despair.  Credence had decided that finding his mother was the answer to every question he had, and Nagini had decided that she was going to keep him from getting himself killed.

Credence was a believer. It was just the way he was. He had looked at Nagini’s still, cold coils and he believed in her.  He leaned on her because she was strong enough to take his weight and he took her hand sometimes because he seemed to understand how good it was to be touched by someone who liked you,  who didn’t want to take anything from you. T hey walked through Paris, two monsters on the hunt.

It didn’t take long to realise that they were being hunted too.

Nagini had first heard about Grindelwald through whispers, and later from other people’s newspapers. He had seemed irrelevant to her then, though it amused her in a savage sort of way to note where wizards drew the line on dark magic. It was acceptable to steal the memories of Muggles and beat your house elf bloody, but Merlin _forbid_ that there be duelling in the streets.

Now Grindelwald’s eyes were on Credence, and on Nagini. She did not like that.

Credence was hungry. It was all he knew how to be, and it was most dangerous of all. Grindelwald took the trailing threads of Credence’s life and played them like puppet strings. Still, there was a moment when Nagini thought they’d done it, that the Lestrange family tomb could give Credence the answers he was starved for. She looked at beautiful Leta Lestrange, almost rigidly elegant in her fashion-plate dress, with those hollow eyes and that anguished mouth, and she could see how badly Credence wanted to belong to her – for their scars to match.

Both abandoned children, both outcasts. But the handsome pureblood with the manic eyes was Leta’s brother, and Credence was nameless again, and when Grindelwald chose to find them, when he held out his hands like an entreating lover, Credence went.

Once Credence was gone, Grindelwald stopped pretending to be anything other than what he was. He would probably have taken Nagini, if she had held Credence’s hand; she could be a useful sort of monster, she knew. She had just escaped one cage – she was not going to walk into another with her eyes open, not even for Credence. Better to hide, better to live and grieve what was lost. Better to die here.

But she was not the one who died.

Leta Lestrange walked down the steps to where Grindelwald stood, graceful and a little contemptuous even facing the greatest Dark wizard in a generation, and Nagini instinctively recognised what she was going to do right before she did it. The two men Leta loved were abjectly failing to save themselves from the fire, so she drew her wand and screamed down the flames.

Nagini had never wanted so badly for a witch to win. She thought, for the space of a breath, that Leta might have a chance. She could still taste that hope in her mouth when the fire caught hold and Leta burned alive. Only then did Grindelwald leave.

Nagini was trapped in a burning tomb with a handful of outmatched purebloods and a broken-hearted Muggle. She did not realise it until much later, when the fire had been fought to its death and Nicholas Flamel had shepherded them all back to his overcrowded little townhouse, but there had been someone else in the tomb with them.

There had been a ghost.

 

*

 

“That is _not_ your wand.”

Nagini did not start so much as uncoil, ready to strike, but in the split second of time it took for her to rise off the floor, she had placed the cool, clipped voice. Leta Lestrange stood in front of her, arms folded. “You stole from me,” she said.

“You died,” Nagini said, blankly. There were places to sell a wand where the money exchanged hands with no questions asked, and Nagini needed money if she was going to get out of Europe. Grindelwald had said there was another war coming, and unlike his adoring audience, Nagini did not see that as a prophecy. A man like that did not avert war, he called it to his heels like a dog, and Nagini was not going to stay here to watch it come.

Leta’s ghost regarded her through hollow eyes. “I died,” she echoed thoughtfully. “Yes…I did. I forgot about that. Newt and Theseus are safe?”

“They’re here,” Nagini told her. “In the house.” Really, there was nowhere else safe to go, with Grindelwald’s followers on the verge of a riot and the French Ministry in a state of crisis. Apparently Newt Scamander and his American friend had caused some kind of major diplomatic incident on their way out. Even Yusuf Kama, who looked to be on the verge of some sort of breakdown, had come along to Flamel’s safe house, though if he had any sense Nagini thought he would leave the country as fast as possible. The wizarding standard of acceptable behaviour might be a bewildering zig-zag to her but it seemed likely that Yusuf had broken at least a few laws in his pursuit of vengeance for his mother, and under the current circumstances a pureblood name might not be enough to handwave it away. She wondered if he was relieved that Leta was dead, or whether he was grieving, or whether he was past the point where that sort of thing mattered at all.

Leta did not ask about Yusuf. Once she heard that the Scamander brothers had made it safely out of Grindewald’s inferno, her attention returned to the wand in Nagini’s hand. It was a very pretty thing. Probably it had been made for Leta, tailored to her by a wandmaker as her dresses and shoes had been tailored for a perfect fit.

When Nagini first saw Leta, it was the dress she had noticed first, because that meant money and a witch with money was a woman to avoid if you were a circus monster on the run. The next thing she had noticed had been that face. Leta Lestrange had worn her unhappiness so well, like everything else, it was impossible to imagine her any other way. Even now, she was beautiful, but Nagini could see through her face to the wall behind.

“Can you use that?” Leta asked, tilting her chin at the wand.

“My magic does not require a wand,” Nagini said coolly. She might carry a curse in her blood, but if she needed to fight, she did not need a strip of wood to do it. “I don’t see that it matters,” she added, “as you can’t use it either.”

Leta’s eyes narrowed. Sparks flared from the tip of the wand and Nagini instinctively let go, sending it clattering across the floorboards.

“Oh my,” Leta said, so hard and sweet she almost hid her shock. “It looks like you’re wrong.”

 

*

 

It took less than an hour before Nagini was repenting of her wicked thieving ways.

“ _Stop making it do that_ ,” she hissed.

“I can’t make it do _anything else_ ,” Leta snarled back.

Between them the wand rolled back and forth and sent up sparks. Nagini had to skip backward before it set fire to the horrible frills on her skirt. Leta held out one spectral hand as if coaxing a cat and the wand rolled another inch, leaving a scorch mark on the floorboards. Nagini was almost sure it should not be doing that, but who knew, with witches? Leta was apparently more concerned with the fact her wand was misbehaving than the fact that she was dead and Nagini did not intend to embroil herself further in what was clearly a deteriorating situation.

“You could ask the alchemist,” she suggested.

Leta looked up with a flare of interest, shockingly vivid in a ghost’s face. “We could.”

 

*

 

“Ahhh,” said Nicholas Flamel.

There was a long silence in which he looked at the wand and Nagini and Leta looked at him, until it became apparent he was not going to say anything else.

“So do you agree that it’s still my wand, even though I’m dead?” Leta asked at last. “But if it’s still responding to me, why is it not doing what I want?”

“Mmmm,” said Flamel. There was another long silence. He poked around on a worktable and produced a large book, which proved not to be a dusty research tome, but an album of photographs. “I must confer with a friend,” he explained, leafing through the pages, stopping occasionally to say hello to a sepia-toned witch or wizard. Eventually he reached a photograph that was just the empty backdrop of a large dark office, and knocked one knuckle gently against the margin of the page. “Hello? Are you there, Percival?”

A man walked suddenly into the frame and swung to face them. “What’s going on?”

He looked faintly familiar. The dark eyes beneath thick straight brows had stared out at Nagini from a newspaper, and she realised that she was looking at Percival Graves, former Director of Magical Security in the American Ministry of Magic. Once it had been discovered that Grindelwald had stolen his identity, there had been a massive manhunt to find him, and the papers had reported everything from his brutal death to a secret convalescence in Australia. This photograph, of course, had been taken well before Grindelwald arrived in America. This version of Percival Graves looked sleek, polished and mildly exasperated.

“If this is about those damn Scamanders again,” he began, then looked past Flamel. His eyes moved over Nagini, shrewd and considering, then widened as they fell on Leta. “Ah,” he said. “I see that it is not.”

Leta gently moved Flamel out of the way and explained what had happened in such precise, business-like terms that it hardly seemed like she was discussing her own recent demise. Graves sat on the edge of his desk and steepled his hands under his nose as he listened. It was a stunningly bloodless exchange, which was appropriate enough given that one party was a ghost and the other was a photograph. Perhaps neither of them _could_ really feel.

“You must have heard the saying ‘the wand chooses the wizard’?” Graves asked. “A wandmaker’s art is esoteric and they guard their secrets very jealously, but I can tell you that your situation is not quite unique. Some wands have eccentricities that can’t be easily explained. I knew of a witch whose wand would not create light for anyone but her. There are recorded incidents of wands that splinter when handled by the wrong user. Your situation is intriguing.”

Nagini sighed. Very well – Leta could keep her wand. She would find another way to scrape together the money to get out of here, be it picking pockets as she had done in the circus or slipping aboard a ship in her snake form. She reached for the door.

“Wait a moment.” Graves spoke with such confidence, Nagini wondered if he _knew_ he was made out of paper and could not stop her doing anything that she chose to do. Neither could Leta, for that matter, and even Flamel was a fragile specimen of wizardkind. Nagini could walk out of here and down the stairs, into the street, and from there, wherever she wanted. She opened the door.

“ _Wait_ ,” Graves said again. “You are Credence Barebone’s friend?”

Nagini’s spine tightened. Her foot stopped on the threshold. “Yes.”

“Grindelwald will use him,” Graves said, almost gently, “and then betray him. Whatever promises the man has made, he was break all of them without the smallest hesitation. If Credence will listen to reason from anyone, it may be you.”

“He didn’t,” Nagini said, and was appalled to hear the waver in her voice. “I couldn’t give the answers he wants.” She had tried so hard to hold on to him, to keep him from harm, this one person she cared about and who cared about her. There had been other people in her life once, but that was before the cage. There was no one left now.

Graves exchanged a look with Flamel. “The question that worries us,” he said, “is what Credence is going to do with those answers once he gets them. If Grindelwald spins a plausible enough lie, is Credence going to do what he’s told?”

Nagini did not owe this man any answers at all. But she thought of Credence in the circus, his hunched shoulders and bowed head, the soft whisper: _we are getting out of here._ She thought, what would you tell him to do? What are you going to tell me to do? Because Graves, she thought, was a man very much accustomed to giving orders.

He looked at her narrowly and seemed to understand he would not be getting a reply. “I’d better get back to myself,” he said to Flamel. “He’s getting impatient. Good luck with your experiment, Miss Lestrange. And with yours, Miss Nagini.”

He vanished out the frame. “Well,” Flamel said. “I will look at the wand again.”

This time Nagini did walk out of the room. She had had enough talk of wands for one day. She was halfway down the steps before the screaming started, and the shock that ran through her body was enough to send her tumbling down the rest of the way, sliding instinctively into snake form as she fell. Something happened that was not movement so much as a displacement, and Leta was standing above her, shuddering in the throes of what looked like a seizure. She dropped to her knees and it looked like it hurt, though clearly it could not have done. Could it?

Serpent and ghost regarded one another in shaken silence until Flamel came tottering down the stairs. “Ah no,” he said sadly. “That does not look good.”

Somehow, Nagini did not rip out his throat.

 

*

 

They had a leeway of about fifteen feet. If either one moved too far from the other, it was like being torn at the seams. Nagini refused to take human shape; it hurt worse then, and people tried to talk to her about it, like she wanted to hear what wizards had to say. And then Leta decided to talk to the Scamander brothers.

When Theseus saw Leta, he jerked up out of his chair with a cry and started towards her with his hands held out before realisation swept across his face and his arms fell limply to his sides. Leta looked to Newt, but he would not meet her eyes.

“Holy cow,” the Muggle said. Jacob, Nagini thought his name was, though she had no idea what he was doing here and he, from the look of it, was equally perplexed. “You’re a…well, a kind of a…are you a ghost? I’m sorry, that came out kinda rude, you don’t have to tell me what you are if you don’t feel like it. That’s a really personal question to just come out with.”

Leta gave him a very small smile. “I’m not offended,” she said. “But I am dead.”

Theseus made a painful noise. “Leta,” he said.

“There’s nothing you can do about it.” She shook her head. “Theseus, don’t.”

He had started forward again but stopped about a foot away from her. “It should have been me, you should have let me fight him. Leta, I should have saved you.”

“I’m the better duellist, Theseus,” Leta said tightly. “You didn’t have a hope, and Newt is worse, he can hardly fight at all. I saved you. I wasn’t expecting to argue about it afterwards.”

“How are you here, Leta?” Newt asked. His voice was so soft it was barely there, but she looked at him immediately. “How did you come to us? You shouldn’t be able to do that.”

“Well,” Leta said, “I’m doing it anyway.”

The Scamander brothers stood there, so awkward and ungracious and alive, and Nagini abruptly despised them. They should be thanking Leta – they should be falling to their knees. They should be offering to _help_. But they were looking at her like she was lost, like she was gone, when she was right there in front of them, and she was enduring it with her chin up high.

“I’m sorry,” Theseus said again. Leta looked away so fast it was a flinch.

“I’m not,” she said.


	2. Chapter 2

Once there was a girl who lived in the dark.

Leta remembered her father as she remembered bad dreams, and the two were mixed so much together that she could not always tell which was which. After the loss of his son (after Leta murdered her baby brother) he had withdrawn into the house and closed all the windows, then the curtains, shrouding them all in a permanent night of grief. He had seemed unaware most of the time that Leta was there – it was better than the times he remembered her existence.

The only escape from that house was Hogwarts, and that was no escape at all. Light became an interrogatory beam: wherever Leta went, she was stared at, whispered over. The Kamas had never gone to Hogwarts, but their friends did: wealthy, well-travelled pureblood families who had stayed in Laurena Kama’s beautiful house, met her handsome husband, played with her sweet son, attended her hideous funeral. It was at Hogwarts that Leta learned who her mother and father really were, and every day there was a misery, until Newt.

He had bolt-holes all over the school grounds, places to hide the creatures he adopted, and where he could hide Leta. He frequently had to. Leta had started duelling as a first year and by her third term at Hogwarts she was a master of the underhanded curse, always the quickest to pull her wand. It was rare for a week to pass by when Leta did not have at least one Detention and every class was a few nasty whispers away from an explosion. She did not realise how utterly exhausting it was to be angry all the time until she was hanging upside down from a tree branch with Newt trying to tease Bowtruckles out of her hair, and there was, for a blissful moment of time, nothing to be angry _about_.

Newt was not much of a talker. He did not like to look people in the eyes or be touched unexpectedly, and he needed to do certain things a certain way or he could not do them at all. Leta could not see why that should be a problem. Spells had to be said just the right way, after all. Why should Newt be forced to practice a wand flick for hours in class yet denied the rituals that made his life make sense? But Leta’s love was a selfish thing. She liked being with Newt because he let her be quiet with him, let her into his secrets, let her have small spaces of breath in the endless scream that was her life.

She met Theseus while she was busy falling in love with his brother and all she could remember of that meeting was a tall, gangly boy who did not look quite enough like the one she wanted. It was years before she really noticed him. By then, her friendship had got Newt expelled from Hogwarts. It was amazing how many lives she could ruin without really trying. Imagine what I could do, she thought sometimes, lying awake in bed, if I tried.

Newt did not write to her, afterwards, and she did not dare write to him. She graduated from Hogwarts without him, and somehow without being expelled herself. The usual thing to do then would be to return to the family house and wait for her father to arrange either employment or marriage – those were the expectations of most other pureblood heiresses – but Leta would rather have thrown herself headfirst into the lake. The day she left Hogwarts, she also left England.

She was twenty eight when she saw Theseus Scamander again, staying alone at the Avalon Hotel in London while she tried to figure out what the hell she was doing with her life. Theseus was trailing around after Director Travers, who had been in the middle of his messy divorce and taking it out on Theseus as the most convenient target. Leta had seen a tall, thin man in the hotel bar and thought for a moment, her breath catching in her throat, that it was Newt. Then he turned around, squinted at her like he wasn’t a stranger, and said tentatively, “Leta?”

He remembered her. Fondly, for some reason. She was quite sure she had never been particularly charming to him, but he bought her a drink and later dinner, and not once that night did they talk about Newt, though Leta was fairly sure they were both thinking about him. Leta talked about travelling through Europe, her years living in Greece, France, Denmark. He talked about the Ministry and lowered his voice to share a few wicked pieces of interdepartmental gossip. He made her laugh, which was a surprise; Leta did not laugh often, though she knew how to exploit the slow simmering challenge of her smile. At the end of the night, Theseus asked if he might call on her when he came back to London, this time without a foul-tempered Travers in tow.

Leta did not live in London, but she could, if there was something worth keeping her here. “Yes,” she told him, and he smiled with open relief. She liked his smile. It was nothing like Newt’s.

She was aware that Theseus was interested in her, and that was flattering. Her usual admirers were a crowd of fortune-hunting hangers-on trying to win the favour of the Lestrange heiress. They all thought her money was to be had for a few compliments and cheap sappy Charms, and whenever Leta decided to inflict non-magical society on herself, the assumptions of Muggles were invariably even worse. Theseus just seemed to like her. And if it was wrong to flirt with one brother after loving and betraying the other…well, what was another weight of guilt to Leta? It was not as though anyone was proposing marriage.

Until, a year later, he did. And once again, Leta said yes.

*

Leta knew Newt would never have understood, but she had been happy at the Ministry. It was hard, interesting, significant work. Leta’s colleagues rarely showed any sign of caring about her family scandals, and when they did, she usually knew enough of their own dirty secrets that they did not bother her about it. Most days Theseus would come knocking at her door, one hand in his pocket and a smile on his face, to take her out to lunch, and she’ll stroll back to her office arm in arm with the man who had given her a glittering engagement ring.

She knew damn well it was a house of cards, but she was _happy_.

She met Newt again when he was thirty and she was twenty nine, and he looked at her like she was still a hot-tempered fifteen-year-old hanging out of a tree. Yes, Leta was still angry – Leta did not think she would ever run out of reasons to be angry – but she had taught herself to twist it into disdain, to walk by a jibe with withering dismissal. She worked at the Ministry. When she got angry, she could go out and get something _done_.

Newt, though. Newt was just the same as she remembered him. Bowtruckles in his pockets and feathers stuck to his shoes, eyes on the floor, hiding in plain sight. Standing stiffly with his arms at his sides when Theseus attempted a hug. Disappearing off to Paris with a bewildered Muggle, a suitcase full of bizarre animals and an enraged Travers on his tail. Same old Newt.

Paris was where Leta met Grindelwald. Paris was where Leta died.

*

There was a dreadful irony to all this, that Leta had spent a good decade of her life rising on a pedestal of independence, only for her ghost to end up stuck at Hogwarts.

“This is not a permanent arrangement.” Professor Dumbledore was watching her; even when he was not in the room, she thought she could feel him watching. A man like that knew everything that happened under his roof, and Hogwarts was his, even Travers could not deny that. “This is not a prison,” he said, gently, like he knew anything about it.

Dumbledore had been Newt’s favourite teacher, but Leta had never liked him much. Who the hell thought it was fair to expose the worst fears of a group of teenagers to each other?

Dumbledore opened his mouth to say something else, then paused, interrupted by the soft slithering presence in the corner of the room. The Maledictus, the thief. Nagini. She had not been human long enough for a conversation since Paris, but Leta instinctively felt that she did not like Dumbledore either. She expected Nagini to simply slide out the room, but instead a dark-eyed woman rose out of a shimmer of scales and said, “So that means we can leave now?”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Dumbledore asked mildly. “Where are you planning to go? I did think that perhaps you might find support here.”

“You mean I could talk to other dead people,” Leta said. “I don’t want to do that.”

She hated being dead. She hated that it felt familiar. This emptiness was what it had felt like to be a child in her father’s dark house, and now she could not get out, and the horror of it loomed above her like a wave that would wash away the world if she let it crash down. So she would not.

Nagini moved closer. The way she moved had a sinuous grace that to Leta implied a great deal of taut strength beneath the skin, whichever skin that happened to be. Nagini walked across the room until she was standing beside Leta, body turned towards her though her head was tilted toward Dumbledore, and she said, “Say it now if it’s true. We can leave if we choose to.”

Dumbledore looked between the two of them. “I don’t suppose I could hold you here if I wanted to,” he said, quite pleasantly, “and I don’t suppose you believe that I don’t want to.”

Nagini turned her face to Leta. “Shall we leave?” she asked, like Dumbledore wasn’t there.

Leta smiled. She didn’t realise it at the time, but it was the slow, challenging smile.

“Yes,” she said.

* 

Eight of them had arrived in Scotland three days ago. They had already lost Tina Goldstein and Jacob Kowalski to a Portkey chain that bounced them across three continents and landed them in MACUSA, where there was an entire department waiting to ask what the fuck they thought they’d been doing. It was anyone’s guess what they would do with the Muggle, since the last attempt to get rid of Jacob Kowalski had ended with him right back at the centre of dark magic and murderous conspiracies. And he was the lover of Queenie Goldstein, the Legilimens who had turned to Grindelwald’s side. Loving Jacob had not stopped her abandoning him, which made it a hollow, useless thing in Leta’s eyes. Still, a natural Legilimens was not an asset anyone wanted on Grindelwald’s side, and if her soft spot for a Muggle baker could be used against her, he would not leaving MACUSA any time soon.

Now the Scamander brothers were leaving to attend Leta’s funeral. Looking tortured, Theseus asked Leta if she wanted to go.

“No, thank you,” she said very politely. “Don’t bring lilies, though. I hate lilies.”

Theseus looked at her for a long moment. “I didn’t know that.”

She wanted to kiss him, very gently, to hold his head between her hands and say goodbye the way he needed it, with touch. She wanted to be alive. “Theseus,” she said. “Go and mourn me.”

He turned to go and then said, without looking at her, “Your will. Your family has already read it. I’m sorry.”

“Beloved Lestranges,” Leta said grimly. “They wouldn’t want to let the grass grow.”

They would not have liked what they read in that will. Leta had written it up herself, meticulously portioning out her fortune to the causes she supported and the cousins she could bear, but the bulk of it had been given over to Theseus. He was going to be a very rich man now.

“I just wanted you to know,” Theseus said. “Your flat in London, it’s yours. For however long you want it. Forever. It’s yours.” He took a deep breath and walked out without waiting for Leta’s response, which was perhaps for the best.

Newt had been waiting outside for that talk to be over. He came in like he wanted to be walking in the opposite direction. Emotions everywhere – he would be hating this.

“You don’t have to do this,” Leta said wearily. The dead could not sleep but oh, she wanted to crawl into her own bed so badly. “Newt. You can just leave.”

“I’m sorry,” he blurted out. “I’m sorry I can’t do this right.”

Theseus had managed to pull himself together inside the lines of his suit, but Newt looked like he had not slept since Paris, hair pulled in all directions and mud on his face. He looked lost. He looked like the boy who had gone wandering the Forbidden Forest to try and find centaurs, the boy who didn’t much like being touched but who had held Leta’s hand when she cried.

Leta couldn’t do this at all. She did the only thing she could do: she disappeared into the dark.

*

“They are not going to let me in,” Nagini said flatly, looking up at the elegant facade of Whitehaven Mansions. Leta had been staring at her own window, high above the street; now she looked at Nagini. The frilled, revealing circus dress was gone. Someone had equipped her with a plain dark coat and skirt that did not fit tremendously well, and she had done her hair in a low unflattering knot. She looked like someone’s underpaid secretary.

Leta considered her wand, poking out of Nagini’s coat pocket. She had transformed her own clothes often enough, straightening out creases and tweaking necklines or completely transfiguring an outfit when she was too tired to go home and get changed before an evening out. It had never been difficult magic for her when she was alive. She concentrated on the outline she wanted, reforming to fit the shape of Nagini’s body underneath.

“Ah,” Nagini said. The suit now fit her like a glove, clinging to slim hips and emphasising the length of her legs. Actual gloves had appeared from nowhere, buttoned down the wrist. She was wearing a very small fashionable hat and looked somewhat shocked.

“There,” Leta said, satisfied. “That’s much better.”

They let her in. No one so much as blinked an eye. The Belgian gentleman who lived on the floor below Leta’s lifted his hat as Nagini went by and said a polite “Bonjour, mademoiselle.”

“That’s a Muggle, isn’t it?” Nagini whispered to Leta. “Why is he in a wizarding apartment building?”

“He can’t be Obliviated. Natural resistance,” Leta whispered back, which was absurd, because it was not as though anyone else could see her. “I don’t think we could make him leave if we tried, and he’s not the only one. The Mansions are eclectic.”

“Oh, _eclectic_ ,” Nagini said. “Perhaps I won’t be evicted after all.”

Leta’s flat was just as she had left it. The windows, already large, had been magicked into a floor-to-ceiling wall of glass that let the weak wintry sunlight fall in a sheet across the floor. Every article of furniture in the flat was modern, new, sharp-edged and shining. There were flowers in a vase on the dining table, a week old and wilting.

“You can have the bedroom,” Leta said expressionlessly. “Make yourself at home.”

Nagini moved forward, a cautious sway of movement like she was waiting for the trap to spring. “This is beautiful,” she said, and there was something in her voice, a hesitant sincerity, that caught Leta’s attention as nothing else could have. It made her think of when she herself had first set foot in this place and decided that she would make it her home. She wondered, suddenly, if Nagini had ever had a home, and if she had, how long ago it had been. Sharing this space – in reality, losing it – galled Leta less when she looked at how wide Nagini’s eyes were.

“Are you hungry?” Leta asked. It was becoming disturbingly easy to lose track of human rhythms, but it was early afternoon and Nagini had not eaten yet. There was not much food in the house – there never was, Leta was no cook and she had steadfastly refused to have servants prying through her things – but there was a purse of bank notes in a locked drawer and Leta knew all the best restaurants for miles around.

She took Nagini to one of them, an Italian place where everything tasted as though it had been simmering to perfection since the Roman Empire collapsed. Nagini was a dainty eater, but a fast one, and swallowed down three servings of lasagne in about half an hour. Leta perched on the chair opposite and watched in fascination.

“Do you have to stare?” Nagini asked, after her second glass of wine.

“I can’t eat. What do you suggest I do?”

Nagini’s pale cheeks were beginning to flush and her tense spine had relaxed against the back of her chair. She was staring too, dark eyes fixed on Leta’s face, though she did not seem to realise it. “Are you hungry?” she asked. Perhaps she did not realise how soft and heated her voice was, or perhaps she did. Nagini was no easier to read as a human than she was as a snake.

There was a trace of red sauce on her lower lip, and Leta, who was hungry for so many things, reached across the table to dab her ineffective fingertip there. Nagini gasped. Leta could feel it then, the glorious feeling of satiation after a long good meal, the warm glow from wine, the comfort of a cushioned chair against aching shoulders. Not her shoulders. Leta’s hand slipped unthinkingly down and there was skin, inside and out, she was touching but also within, it was…

“ _Stop_.” Nagini twisted away, breathing heavily. “What was that? What did you do?”

For a split second, before Nagini pulled away, Leta had been breathing too.

*

“Possession,” Graves said briskly. “And do you know it’s two in the morning?”

“No, it’s not,” Leta said. It was not two in the morning in London; anyone who was not in London had to take their chances. “You’re a photograph, why do you care what time it is?”

“I am indeed a photograph which means I do not have the information you want and I had to wake my original to ask him. He is very much aware that it is two in the morning.”

It was three in the afternoon for Leta. She had torn apart the flat looking for photographs, the ones from formal Ministry events, in the frantic hope that Percival Graves would be in one of them. After rifling through most of wizarding high society, she finally found a picture taken at a gala last year. There she was in a ballgown, Theseus’ hand on her waist. There was Travers, dour as usual. There, in an exceptionally well-tailored suit, was Director Graves, one hand tucked in his trouser pocket and the other raising a mostly empty glass of champagne.

It had taken ages to convince him to go to himself. Flamel’s photograph had clearly been taken of Graves in a more accommodating mood. But eventually Graves had tossed back the rest of his champagne and stalked out of the frame, and returned with answers, how begrudgingly.

“This is a case of possession,” he said. “I imagine it’s easier due to your pre-existing connection. You felt what she felt because you temporarily inhabited her body. Can I return to the party now?”

“I didn’t mean to do it,” Leta snarled. “How did I do it?”

“I am, as you so recently pointed out, a photograph. I have no idea what you’re doing. For that, you need to talk to my original, and all I can say is good luck with that.”

Leta put down the photograph and went to find Nagini, who had taken serpent form as soon as they re-entered the flat and was coiled in the dark hallway. She knew Nagini had been listening to the conversation with Graves, but apparently Nagini still did not want to talk.

“I’m sorry,” Leta said, for the tenth time. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.” That was cheap; she could do better. She straightened out her shoulders. “I know you want to get away from me, and I’m sorry you can’t, but I will give you as much space as I can and I swear, I will not do that again.”

She thought she might go onto the landing. There should be enough leeway between them that she could do it without causing Nagini pain. Before she could go, however, the snake slid out of the dark end of the hall, across the floorboards into the light, and curled slowly around her, transforming back into a woman. Nagini was very close, staring into Leta’s eyes like she could not see through them.

“Next time,” Nagini said, “you ask first.”

It was Leta’s turn to stare. “I beg your pardon?”

“You don’t frighten me,” Nagini said softly, a breath close to Leta’s face, so close Leta could almost feel its warmth. “You don’t frighten me at all, Leta Lestrange.” She leaned closer. “Do you want me to touch you?”

“Yes,” Leta whispered. Absurd, because only Nagini was going to hear her. Only Nagini mattered right now. Another inch, and their lips touched, and Nagini’s breath was hers.

Was it a kiss if Leta could feel it from both sides, a phantom of pressure, the heat of Nagini’s mouth against the suggestion of hers? Leta traced her fingers across the fine bones of Nagini’s face and moaned at how good it felt. She stroked down Nagini’s arms and knew the slight tremble as if it was her own flesh. Then Nagini’s hands were in her hair, a fierce tugging grip, and it was a reclamation: Leta had hair, not merely the memory of it. She had lips that could be bitten, hips that could be clutched, skin that could be kissed. She was here, she was here.

Nagini’s teeth grazed down her throat, or was it the other way around? Leta gasped out air that was not from her lungs. She could not keep track of where she ended and Nagini began, and Nagini did not seem to care, writhing in her arms, demanding more with the bruising pull of slim, strong fingers. Leta gave her more. She could not have done anything else. Nagini showed her where she wanted her hands and how she wanted to be touched, and it was so right, so simple, to come together as a sobbing, shuddering whole.

To let go felt like a second death, but it had to be done eventually. Nagini slid to the floor and sat there, looking stunned. Her hair had come down, falling down her back and into her face. Leta, of course, looked just the same and her knees could not give way because they weren’t really there. She sat down anyway.

Nagini dabbed carefully at her swollen lips. “If this is a curse,” she said slowly, “then I wish all curses were like it.”

Leta laughed and took a risk, resting her head on Nagini’s shoulder. It was too soon for friendship, too soon to be lovers. She did not know Nagini, but she craved her. How could she not? Monsters always wanted things that did not belong to them, and they were never satisfied.

It was too soon to feel alive again, but Leta held Nagini’s hand, and breathed.


	3. Chapter 3

Once there was a man who was buried alive.

He lay for days in a shallow ditch with barely the air to breathe, the darkness pressing in on him as a physical weight on his chest. This was Grindelwald’s idea of humour. Where better to keep a man named Graves? And while he needed Percival alive for information, he did not need him to be sane at the end of it.

Percival had been captured before, during the Great War, and tortured, and had come out the other side through the force of his will. Under the earth, cursed and paralysed, forgotten by all but his enemy – Merlin help him, he broke like a matchstick.

Percival knew he was dying when he found himself free. He could breathe and he could think. He stood, impossibly, in the middle of an empty street under the vast night sky and there was someone at the other end of the street, kneeling on slick wet pavement with cards fanned out in front of them. There were suites under their hands that Graves had never seen before and would never see again. _Pick a card,_ the dealer had said.

_No,_ Percival had said. He would, at that moment, have said no to anything, because he _could_ say it again. _I’m dying, not playing a fucking hand of poker._

_Pick a card,_ the voice coaxed. _Any card._

Percival looked at the cards. It was just a brief glance, but the dealer smiled and took a card from the deck, holding it up. The King of Shadows.

_What does that mean?_ Percival had demanded, backing away.

The rest of the cards were melting away like snow, a darkening sludge at the dealer’s feet. _It means you have not finished playing your hand, Percival Graves._

It was three days before he woke up: a screaming, cursing, clawing skeleton of a man, unrecognisable to anyone who had known him, except for the wand that flared with brilliant white light at his touch. The wand chooses the wizard, and it had never chosen Grindelwald.

By then, Credence Barebone was already dead and Grindelwald was in a cell.

*

Except, of course, MACUSA was just one fuck up after another these days and not one thing Percival was told was true, when they told him anything at all.

For five months, he was confined to the white walls and crisp sheets of a private room in a heavily guarded hospital wing. Eventually, he was released into the care of his family, to their mutual horror.

His father had attempted a few visits early on, with the idea that what Percival needed was hearty conversation on the most banal possible subjects conducted very loudly and very slowly. The Healers had to ask him to stop coming. Percival’s mother and younger brother could not manage even that much, unable bear looking into the chasm between what Percival had been and what he was now. After a hideous two weeks confined in the guest wing of the Graves family town house, Percival’s youngest sister arrived in her usual whirl of fashionable clothes and eccentrically modern hair and announced she was taking him with her.

“To _Australia_?” his father said, in much the tone he might have said, to _hell_?

“People do live in Australia,” Arabella retorted. “And Percival said yes.”

What Percival had done was stare blankly at the wall and nod slightly, which was as much as he really communicated with anyone right now. He could not handle much noise, the demands of talk and movement; if the world became too much, his mind would retreat from it and he would lose fragments of time, maybe minutes, maybe hours. The demands of the Portkey journey to Sydney had him bed-bound for days.

He came to with Arabella sitting beside the bed, reading aloud in a low voice, like she was really reading to herself. She noticed him looking at her, held up the book and said, “Wodehouse.”

He blinked and frowned slightly.

“Muggle books, marvellous stuff,” she assured him. “I think Jeeves _must_ be a wizard. Grab the book off me or something if you want me to stop.”

Percival fell asleep again, listening to her laugh.

Arabella moved with a glamorous modern set, which was mildly surprising – Percival could honestly say he had never thought that much about Melbourne, Australia, but when he had, glamour had not been part of his mental image. Arabella’s friends included a) two heiresses, one obsessed with boats and the other with jewels, and sometimes with each other, b) an avant-garde sculptor who made morbid jokes and drank a truly spectacular amount of gin at Arabella’s expense, and c) an independently wealthy lady detective, who came from an old wizarding family in England but chose to run around with the Muggle police, solving murders and waving a _gun_ , of all things. Percival had not actually met any of these people. Arabella did not even suggest introducing him, and had put shielding charms around his room so that he could not hear what happened outside of it, which said a good deal about how raucous her parties could be. But she dropped anecdotes about her friends in between chapters of P.G. Wodehouse novels and it did not seem to bother her in the slightest that Percival barely responded to anything she said. Percival guessed that she was used to it, growing up in their parents’ house.

The photographs were another of Arabella’s ideas. She said, in her eternally affable way, that she was not Percival’s secretary and was tired to fielding his correspondence, so why not get all these people to talk to the versions of him they already knew? Then the photographs could talk among themselves, and to Percival if they felt like it, and if anyone had a problem with that they were free to stop writing. Propelled forward by Percival’s slight, reluctant acquiescent nod, Arabella nailed frames all over one wall, a total of twenty two pictures in all. “A jury times two,” she announced, hanging the last one. “That should do the trick.”

It was unbearable at first. Percival hated the sight of his own face, so coolly confident, and they were clearly unnerved by the sight of him. Was there a lower point that the realisation that your own photographs did not want to deal with you? But to get rid of the photographs Percival would have to explain himself to Arabella, and he did not want to do that. She was not his secretary; she was not his nurse either. He would simply have to deal with himself, however ghastly that sounded.

The _really_ frustrating thing was, his photographs had reached the same conclusion.

“Say that again but make sense this time,” ordered his official portrait, glowering out of the office that was no longer his. “I have Picquery waiting on an answer.”

“Take a deep breath,” advised one supercilious version of himself, swigging champagne from a horrible party last year. “And another breath. Keep going. I understand it’s straightforward.”

Percival struck a match, which was also straightforward, and at least shut up his paper reflections for a while.

Wizarding photographs were a limited magic. The images could move and talk and to a very limited degree think, but they were confined to a single moment in time, to moods and memories that would never change. An old photograph of Percival in his mid twenties, taken by his lover at the time, was optimistic and surprisingly patient; that was worse than the sarcasm and brusque commands. Another picture was of Percival with blood on his cheek and a graze on his chin, tie undone and shirt collar open, coat draped over his arm, taken after a successful bust with the best team of Aurors he’d ever had. That version of himself was full of quiet fierce confidence, full of fight. “Don’t you dare give in,” he hissed in the middle of the night, when Percival is trying to breathe through the weight of the dark. “You are not dead. You are not beaten.”

It was an exhausting achievement when Percival walked out of this room and went downstairs, where he could hear all the noise of the house and street combined: Arabella playing the piano and the cook banging about in the kitchen with the radio on, the sound of carts and cars and people calling back and forth…The longest Percival had been able to stand it so far was an hour. He had not slept straight through the night once in the ten months since his rescue. He spent most of each day in bed because being alive was such a goddamn fucking effort, he had no energy for anything else. He had read every Wodehouse novel Arabella possessed at least three times over and by now he wanted to throttle Bertie Wooster to death with his own cravat.

Percival was well and truly beaten.

Sometimes he would dream of building a house of cards. This was not like any of his other dreams, absent as it was of torture and lingering death, but it disturbed him just the same. He dreamed that he built layer after layer of cards until the tower of them was taller than he was, and when the cards inevitably collapsed, he saw that they were all the same suite, falling through his fingers until there was just one left. The King of Shadows.

It felt as though he was being sent a message, reminders of a question he could not remember asking. But as any of his old acquaintance could have testified, Percival was not in the business of giving answers any more.

*

“They let him escape,” Graves said. He could hear the echo of the words in his ears as if he had spoken twice. _They let him escape._ “They had him, and he got away.”

He was sitting upright in one of the large leather armchairs downstairs, a gaunt spectre of a man with iron-streaked hair and flat black eyebrows. Arabella was perched on the arm of the chair, arms folded very tightly across her chest, glittering with diamonds and fury. They were both staring fixedly at the unfortunate lackey sent by Seraphina Picquery to alert them of Grindelwald’s disappearance.

“He had recruited from inside MACUSA itself,” the lackey stuttered out. “There was no warning. The President took every precaution –”

“And now a murderous Dark wizard is on the loose,” Arabella said witheringly. “Bang-up job all round, well done, you can get out of my house now.”

They spent the rest of the day building wards. They did not have to talk about it, and they didn’t, but Percival knew that Arabella was watching him, and he was glad of it. He caught his wand hand trembling more than once. Not with fear. Not even with rage. This was something bigger than either, claws hooked in the inside of Percival’s chest, slowly shredding away the defences of almost a year in recovery to see what was buried underneath.

Percival’s magic did not respond as it once had, with unthinking ease. Now it took all his concentration to dredge up the right spell, and then he had to control it. A simple ‘Alohomora’ would reduce a door to splinters. ‘Lumos’ set the curtains on fire. The power came in drips or a deluge, with no middle ground, leaving him hopelessly drained by the simplest charm. For once, though, it did not matter; he would throw everything he had at the wards either way. That night he stood at his bedroom window looking out at the faint shimmer of spells outside his window and listening to the soft rustle of his photographs whispering to each other. They were unsettled, uneasy. Percival wondered how many photographs of Grindelwald were out there in the world, and what they were doing right now; if they knew what their original was doing. If they cared.

*

The events of Paris were at least confirmation that MACUSA was not alone in its complete inability to handle Grindelwald and his followers; apparently neither the British or French Ministries of Magic could do a damn thing to stop him either. And once more the Scamander brothers were in the thick of things, Newt with his Muggle friend, Theseus leading a team of Aurors, both utterly failing to prevent disaster. While the Aurors dithered and argued, Theseus’ fiancee had died fighting and Nicholas _Flamel_ of all people had emerged from seclusion to prevent a magical inferno from swallowing the city. Albus seemed entirely unsurprised by any of it, but that Albus for you – the man had a poker face like no one Percival had ever met. Although catching the minutiae of expression when you were talking to someone through a fire was not the easiest task, and this was altogether a horrible conversation. This was the first time Percival had talked directly to someone who was not his sister since he had left America and he did not know where he had ever found the patience to do this multiple times a day.

“We suffered a defeat,” Albus was saying earnestly, crouched in front of the fireplace. “But so did he, and by now he’ll know it. That gives us the upper hand.”

“Does it,” Percival said, as flatly as humanly possible.

“Ah, Percival,” Albus said, giving that particular smile which meant he knew you weren’t on side yet but he was going to win you round come hell or high weather. Percival came to know that smile very well during the Great War, usually right before they charged into battle or right before they tumbled into bed. “Trust me. I have an ace up my sleeve.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Percival said, very tightly.

“Oh, it’s a Muggle phrase. A rather hilarious one, actually.” Albus was in an odd mood, buzzing with a kind of fierce, guilty relief. He was also leaping from tangent to tangent, which was never a good sign. “Even Travers is coming around to my side.”

“Now that you have acknowledged that you are a side to be joined,” Percival said sharply. It was very easy to tear into Albus, but then he could hardly throw stones regarding political inactivity. And Albus, he knew perfectly well, had not been inactive. “For Merlin’s sake, Albus, why couldn’t you just explain to him what the devil you were doing?”

“Ah, Percival. It is crucial that he joins _my_ side,” Albus said softly. “I will not join his.”

It sounded, Percival thought, like something Grindelwald might say.

*

Leta Lestrange was, at first, just another problem on a rapidly unravelling list. She was lucky to encounter one of Percival’s friendlier copies, who took something of an interest in her problems and badgered Percival until he took an interest too. “The girl’s dead and her wand still hasn’t given up on her,” his photograph from Flamel’s house told him with exaggerated patience. “Pay attention. The other girl turns into a snake, by the way, it’s impressive. I like her.”

Percival pulled a pillow across his face. “You would.”

He had met Leta a few times. Wizarding society was small; wealthy and influential wizarding society was even smaller, and Leta was made memorable by the ugly gossip that followed her like a second shadow. Graves had been distantly sorry for her, because he had known her father and that was grounds enough for sympathy even without getting into the whole sordid history of her mother and step-brother. Lestrange ought to have been arrested, of course, but the Imperius curse was a nightmare to prove in court and Lestrange had the money and influence to dissuade the English Aurors from looking too deeply into the case. Leta had been born under a curse and that was a touch that lingered, one way or another, for life.

Perhaps she could be free of it in death, or perhaps not, because she certainly wasn’t free from Grindelwald.

“She wants to know what’s being done,” Percival’s champagne-swilling photograph informed him, lounging against his frame. “Nagini was lurking on the ceiling as a snake, but I gather the sentiment comes from both of them. They speak as one, apparently.”

“I imagine they do,” said the official portrait severely, “given that Miss Lestrange can _possess_ her.”

“How are they?” asked the friendly one from Flamel’s house. “How’s Leta bearing up?”

“If I didn’t know she was dead, I wouldn’t guess it. She seems to be on the verge of throwing up her hands and going after Grindelwald herself. I gather she reads the papers, or Nagini does, and that business in Denmark has been splashed across the _Prophet_ for days.” The photograph shook his head. “Grindelwald is certainly finding use for an Obscurial. Nagini is upset. She wants to go and look for her friend.”

“Why isn’t Albus recruiting her?” Flamel-Percival glanced accusingly at his original. “For that matter, why aren’t _we_ recruiting the pair of them?”

“Bad enough that we lost the boy,” Percival’s official portrait chimed in, and there was a general hum of agreement from the other photographs, like they’d been getting together and talking about this behind Percival’s back. Percival gave up on the idea that they might eventually stop talking and let him sleep, and got out of bed.

“Where are you going?” several voices asked disapprovingly. Percival did not answer.

Credence. It was one of a hundred sore spots, barely scabbed over. Credence Barebone had trusted in a man with Percival’s face, and it had nearly got him killed. What the Aurors had done in New York, and then again in Paris, had more or less delivered him into Grindelwald’s lap, but what would have happened if Credence had encountered the real Director Graves? Percival had met young men like Credence during the War, lost and hungry and aching for a cause. Percival _had_ recruited them, wizards and No-Majs alike, and often he had got them killed.

Grindelwald had chosen his face for a reason.

“You do realise it’s three in the morning?” Arabella said, when Percival knocked on her door. She said it conversationally, wand in hand.

“Not in London, it’s not,” Percival said.

When Arabella brought him to Australia, she had also packed up the contents of his apartment – what little had survived Grindelwald’s residence there – into a trunk and left it in the attic for Percival to sort through at his leisure, which meant it had not been sorted through at all. “I don’t remember where I put your books, Percy,” she sighed, peering into the depths of the trunk with her wand raised for light. It was about the size of the attic itself, inside, only much more cluttered, and somehow dustier too. “Why can’t you Accio?”

“I can’t remember the exact titles. Why couldn’t you put all the books together?”

“Because I’m not your housekeeper, is why. It's not my job to be tidy. You’re going to have to get in there and look.”

She leaned on the edge of the trunk and called down directions as Percival hunted around. “What’s that on the left? Oh, sorry, looks like that’s all plates. What about over there? Nothing? No, _underneath_ the box.” It was too dark for Percival, down here, but he dared not risk Lumos in such a crowded space. Arabella kept her wand raised, its shining tip like a guiding star; Percival could look up at her and remind himself that he was not really underground. He could climb out any time he chose. He was choosing to stay down here, to look for the books.

“Hurrah,” Arabella said sleepily, when he finally found them. “I shall go back to bed now.”

“Arabella,” Percival began, once he had climbed out of the trunk. She narrowed her eyes at him. “Thank you,” he said stiffly. “For everything you’ve done. I’m grateful –”

“Don’t,” Arabella said. “I only just started not worrying about you, don’t ruin the moment.”

Percival spent the rest of the night on research, tuning out the commentary of the picture gallery on his wall as he scribbled down notes and came to a series of unpleasant conclusions. A quiet settled on the room as his photographs watched him work. A few pictures from his Auror days wandered up into the office frame and leaned together on the desk, whispering with his portrait. The Percival at the party finally put down his wineglass and rubbed a hand across his eyes.

The photographs were who Percival had been, once, for a moment in time; they knew his face, and knew what the look on it meant.

“Who will take the message?” Flamel-Percival asked at last.

“Me, of course,” Percival said. It was time to pick a fucking card.

*

_Dear Miss Lestrange,_

_We have not communicated directly before, but I hope that our conversations through intermediaries will be enough of an introduction to speak freely. I can only apologise for not contacting you sooner._

_I believe I have misunderstood your situation. My initial impression was that your manifestation was connected to your wand, as a haunted object, and that your tie to Miss Nagini was due to her handling of the wand so soon after your death. It seemed the most likely explanation. If this had been the case, however, your connection would be weakening by now. Really, it would never have been so strong in the first place. I should have realised that.  
_

_There are acts of dark magic that can stretch out a wizard’s existence to something near immortality. It invariably comes with a steep price. The making of Horcruxes is one such act. To split one’s soul and place the fragments in material objects requires sacrifice; wizards and witches throughout history have committed slaughter to do it, but there is another way. You sacrificed yourself, Miss Lestrange, to save others, and they are not yet safe. I believe you have left parts of yourself in the world to finish the battle you started. A fragment lies in the wand; a fragment likely lies within Miss Nagini as well._

_I cannot say what will happen when the battle is ended. I wish I could._

_All I can tell you is that you do not fight alone._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Percival Graves_


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's brief enough that I will not be adding this to the main tags, but I'll warn for it here: there is an anti-Semitic slur used in the beginning of this chapter and some misogynistic language. Also, reference to that non-consensual engagement that made me go "WHAT" in a cinema.

Once there was a girl who heard voices.

She was  _too loud always pulling my arm wants so much attention pretty face like her mother prettier than her sister pity she didn’t get her father’s head for Transfiguration not quick not clever but born to make some lucky man a good wife._ She was  _Queenie, don’t you think you’d better stay home? It’s too much for you out there. It’s not good for you._

Queenie Goldstein had always known more than was good for her. When she was a little girl all she heard were a few snatches of words; like her own shadow whispering in her ear. It was enough to know when her mother was running out of patience, when her father was too tired to play with her, when Tina was cross or jealous. Queenie knew which teachers liked her best, which shopkeepers would smile and which would shout, which neighbours she should avoid if she could (and she nearly always could). 

As she got older, the voices grew clearer, and louder, and she was  _silly girl another empty-headed blonde oh thank the Lord there’s the coffee girl at last look at those tits show us a bit of leg honey pity she’s a Yid of course bet that bitch gets her pick of the boys._ She was  _so bloody cold where am I going to get the money for new shoes, I’ll be lucky to get the rent together this week_ except it was not her feet that were aching and half-frozen; she was  _fucking for hours, God he’s good, can’t get enough_ except she had never met either man in her life; she was  _never getting better, this cough is never going away, how am I going to tell the boys?_ Except she did not have sons; she did not have a cough that was going to slowly kill her.

“Just shut it out, Queenie,” Tina would say, every time she caught Queenie with her head in someone else’s clouds. “It’s not right to listen in on other people like that.”

“I can’t help it,” was Queenie’s answer. Not listening was hard. It was like walking down the street with her hands clamped to her ears; but sometimes she had to do that anyway, because it was so  _goddamn_ loud out there. Queenie could not cope in a crowd. She could manage at work because she knew everybody there and they knew her, a familiar back-and-forth of thoughts. Queenie was a popular girl. She had co-workers to gossip with on her breaks, and office girls to smoke with, sometimes go dancing with, old school friends to take out to lunch when they came into the city for the shopping. She could make always make people like her, if she tried. She could make them love her, if she tried harder, but she was not supposed to do that, Tina had said it was wrong. 

Tina made the rules. She was the eldest, the smart one. She had the disapproving stare of an old maiden aunt and the hopeful naivete of a little girl, and she could draw sharp lines between right and wrong without a second thought while Queenie was drifting on the tide of humanity’s whims and wishes and wickedness. Tina thought that it wasn’t Queenie’s fault. She thought Queenie needed looking after. 

_Is it too much for you? Is it getting too noisy in your head?_

_I’m the bee’s knees, Teenie, don’t you worry._

Nobody, not even Tina, wanted to find out what Queenie was really thinking. Half the time she was not even sure herself, if the thoughts in her head were her own or if they had come to roost in that vast cacophonous place like cuckoos in the nest. How could she ever be sure? How could she know who she was, when there were so many people she could be?

*

Austria was cold in the same way the sky was blue, overwhelming and inescapable. Queenie was pretty sure that someone had said this was Austria, but they might have been lying. It was getting hard to tell. She might have thought it was Austria and made everyone else believe it – but no, whatever else Grindelwald might be, he was a man who knew his own mind. If he thought she was depositing ideas in his skull like shells left by an incoming tide, she’d be dead now.

That’s almost a comfort.

Grindelwald could play the urbane man of the city, but the mantle of warrior king was more to his liking. This was where he thought he belonged, in the remoteness of the mountains, within high stone walls, in the castle he had taken by right of conquest. He was a towering figure on a chessboard and his counterpart was positioned far across the board, the figurehead of Hogwarts, surrounded by snowy mountains of his own. It was a thought tinged with equal parts of grim resolution and a dark, hungry lust. Grindelwald wanted so badly to knock Dumbledore down, and in his heart, he had never lost the hope that Dumbledore wanted to fall beneath him.

Queenie dreamed those dreams, sometimes, until the faces changed and it was Jacob at her feet while the world burned behind him and was just the two of them, forever.

*

Queenie read gossip magazines and cheap sensationalist newspapers, so she recognised the name Scamander when she first met Newt. She’d seen photographs of his mother at galas and society parties, glittering with diamonds, arm in arm with one Ministry official or another – more recently she had seen a picture of his brother, very stiff and upright and British, on the occasion of his engagement to Leta Lestrange, who had smiled at the camera like she’d got away with something. Queenie saw a different Leta in Newt’s head, younger, fiercer, but still wearing the smile that said  _You can’t stop me now._

There were all kinds of interesting things that Queenie could have fished out of Newt’s head if she wanted – she’d done it before and hardly ever got caught – but the truth was, she didn’t care much about what was going on in Newt’s head, because by then she was busy falling in love with Jacob Kowalski, and shortly after that, she was busy having her heart broken.

Queenie had wanted Jacob the minute she met him, with a wide-eyed covetous wonder that she tried to keep off her face in case Tina noticed (Tina didn’t notice; Tina was busy betraying people and getting betrayed in turn, her clear lines wearing thinner with every choice). Jacob was a No-Maj, a soldier turned baker, an ordinary little man who wanted the world to be better than it was and believed, against overwhelming evidence, that it  _could_ be better. He was beautiful. So Queenie stroked through the thoughts laid bare to her inside his head, to see what he liked best, and presented herself to him as a goddess of home and hearth. She was the smiling, golden-curled glamour girl who could cook up a storm or dance the night away, or both, if he’d just sit down at her table, if he’d just take her hand on the dancefloor, if he’d just stay.

She helped him reclaim a head full of lost magical memories, she all but went down on her knees with a fucking ring, and what had he decided to remember? 

_It’s no good, Queenie, they’re never going to let us alone. If we got married, what would you tell your friends?_

_What does that matter? I can make new friends! We can go away, we could go to England. Things are different there, better._

_ And what about if we have kids? What would happen to them, if somebody from your world found out? Honey, I had a pretty good taste of what Joe Wizard thinks of a man like me. _

_ What about what I think? Or don’t you care about that any more? _

Round and round, same argument, same heartbreak, round and round again until Queenie looked at the man she loved and thought  _ I don’t have to do this. _ She had thought,  _ I can get what I want this time. _

She did not tell Tina. That was her canary on this descent; if she had thought she was doing the right thing, it would have been safe to tell her sister, still Queenie’s arbiter of right and wrong. But Tina was in Paris, and Queenie was  _ so pretty so perfect too good for me  _ and that was the worst part of it all.

Queenie had believed him.

*

At first, life in the castle was like being at a house party where the host thought plotting the crash and burn of nations made for charming after-dinner conversation. Grindelwald had even gone to the trouble of dressing Queenie and Credence for their roles, thick furs and beautifully tailored clothes in the same colour palette that Grindelwald favoured himself. 

Vinda Rosier, the fourth in their little gathering, wore wine dark lipstick and smoked like a very chic chimney. She was generally to be found at Grindelwald’s side, wearing a faint ironic smile, as if anarchism was merely an affectation she could discard any time she chose.

Grindelwald’s other followers slipped quietly in and out of the background, arriving to receive their orders and leaving to enact them. They were only the bit players in the performance – the starring role, as directed by Grindelwald, belonged to Credence.

Queenie did not know what to think of Credence, which was new, and did not know what he thought of her, which was unprecedented. It was dark inside his head, a swirling shadowy thing that was both a part of him and its own self, and when Queenie looked at it, she felt it looking back. 

On the outside, Credence was a young man too tall for his comfort and too thin for his height, hungry-eyed and hollow-cheeked. The beautifully tailored clothes managed to hang awkwardly on his broad bony shoulders, catching on his sharp elbows and knees. Grindelwald took him on short trips away from the castle and did not tell Queenie where they went. Nobody told Queenie anything. She did not want them to tell her. Credence came back smelling of smoke, with shadows inside his eyes, and Grindelwald came back smiling.

Rosier was the one who took Queenie places – brief meetings with minor allies, picking up packages and dropping off notes, attending little supper parties with the kind of people who had their dead house-elves tax i dermied and put on display. The first time Queenie went anywhere with Grindelwald, it was the four of them in Denmark, where Grindelwald had arranged a rally like the one in Paris. Queenie was there when it turned into a riot. She heard herself screaming, hands clutched to her head, and it wasn’t until she was out of the crowd, shuddering in the silence of Grindelwald’s safehouse, that she realised it was Credence who was holding onto her.

“What’s happening to her?” he was demanding, his hands awkward on her shaking shoulders. “Do something, help her!”

“She’s done what she was there to do,” Rosier said, walking over and tilting back Queenie’s head to get a look at her eyes. Queenie flinched away. “Miss Goldstein is a natural Legilimens. Her presence is an amplifier for the mood of the room. And of course she could warn us when the Aurors were close, which was very much appreciated.”

“But she’s hurt,” Credence said, and there was an ugly edge his voice, a harbinger of trouble. “Doing that  _ hurt _ her.”

Grindelwald put an arm around Credence’s shoulders and squeezed. “She has shown great bravery,” he said simply. “A true believer in the cause. Vinda, take her to her room, make sure she rests. Perhaps a sleeping potion will do the trick.”

Rosier murmured agreement, ushering Queenie away . By nightfall they were back in the castle, and Queenie could have wept with relief to feel the mountains closing in around her.

The house party dragged on. During the long hours after dinner, while Grindelwald expounded on the parts of wizarding history he wanted to re-enact and Rosier smiled around a cigarette, Credence would sit on one side of the room and Queenie would sit on the other and they would look at each other as if they could not remember how they had come to be here.

But of course they did.

*

Newt liked Queenie, but he had been Jacob’s friend first. He was gentle, understanding and so horrified by what she had done that it bleached out his thoughts and bled into Queenie’s brain.

That was not what hurt most.

Newt broke the spell on Jacob, because of course he did, and Queenie did the only thing left to her now that she had broken her life to bits: she’d run into the street with the vague idea of finding Tina and confessing everything. Tina would be horrified too, but she would love Queenie anyway. She would show Queenie how to put this right, and she would remember what Queenie had done for the rest of their lives, even as she scraped together excuses for it in her head.

That was not what hurt most.

Jacob had followed Queenie into the street, just as desperate to patch this over, and he loved her too – he loved her so much she could feel it like a steady heat against her skin, like he could keep her warm just by standing there with her in the freezing London night, and it was not enough. It wasn’t enough. Because he loved her and he thought she was crazy. It was a word like a knife, leaving jagged marks in its wake. And even though she knew she deserved it, after what she’d done, it hurt more than she could have imagined.

That was not what hurt the  _ most _ .

What hurt most was that when the spell broke, Jacob was not surprised. He loved Queenie more than anyone else in the world, and he already knew not to trust her.

*

Queenie drifted through the castle, away from the grinding gears of the war machine that was Grindelwald and the spinning blades of Rosier, upward into the tower where darkness waited. Credence was on the roof, perched above the dizzying drop into a ravine.  The eyes he turned on Queenie were as dark as the inside of his head. She did not know what he was thinking, except that he was thinking about her. That was what had called her up the stairs, out into the breathtaking cold.

“You’re Tina Goldstein’s sister,” Credence said.

Queenie wanted to snap out a denial. She did not want her sister’s name said aloud here.

Instead, she said, “You’re the boy from the church.” Tina had told her about him, tears of frustration and shame in her eyes. He had looked younger in Tina’s memories, like a child; Queenie found it difficult to envision this man as having been a child.

“The church is gone,” Credence said, without inflection.

“Oh. Good.” Queenie shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. “Why aren’t you cold?”

Credence blinked at her in apparent incomprehension, then looked around at the dusting of snow on the tiles around him like he was seeing it for the first time. “There’s a neck-breaker of a fall down there as well,” Queenie pointed out helpfully.

Credence shrugged. “I’m not going to fall.”

“If you say so.” Queenie drew her wand and added a couple of charms to her coat, to keep out the worst of the wind’s bite. When she looked up, she found Credence’s hungry gaze following her movements. She caught a fragment of thought from him, of a large hand smoothing over raw skin and leaving it whole; then the thought shifted and it was a memory of a tunnel, splintering into streaks of bright light and pain.

“I hear you sometimes,” Credence said. “When you’re not in your own head. I thought it was ghosts at first, and then I realised it was you.” Queenie stared at him and he smiled a little around the corners of his mouth. “I thought maybe you weren’t doing that on purpose. It’s okay. It’s nice. Like hearing somebody singing in another room.” 

Queenie could think of absolutely nothing to say. She wanted, quite badly, to cry and wasn’t sure why. Silence fell between them; a soft scatter of snow landed on Queenie’s hair, left brief white patches on Credence’s shoulders. It was so quiet here, among the mountains, underneath the grey sky. Queenie was herself here, as much as she had ever been, and there was nobody else to blame for what she had done to get here.

She did not  _want_ to be inside her own head.

At last she turned to walk inside, but caught a flash of colour from the corner of her eye and looked over her shoulder in time to see a brilliant red and gold bird land on the roof beside Credence, dipping its glorious head to be petted. There was a small envelope tied to its leg. Credence glanced sharply at Queenie, and the thing inside his head looked at her too.

Queenie shook her head once, taking a step back, into the stairwell of the tower. She stopped halfway down with her hand on the rough stone wall and took a deep breath, then another breath, as though she had been running, though she had not. So, Credence was getting letters, and Queenie was quite sure that Grindelwald didn’t know about that. He had revealed Credence’s pet to be a phoenix, and Credence was using the bird to keep secrets from him.

Well, Queenie thought. Good.

*

Paris was a nightmare.

There were so many people, so many voices that Queenie couldn’t tell which were in her ears and which were in her head, and Tina wasn’t  _there_ . She did not know what to do, if Tina wasn’t there. She would have followed anyone, just then, if they sounded kind enough, and Vinda Rosier could sound sweet as sugar when she chose. In the middle of a crowd like that, Queenie could not tell she was dealing with a skilled Occlumens.

She figured that out around the time Rosier shut the door behind her, and locked it.

No Occlumens could keep Queenie out forever, not if she was really trying, but they didn’t need to keep her out forever. Queenie had never been much good at defensive magic, at anything beyond the domestic charms and spells that she’d been using every day of her life. She had never needed to be, back in New York, with her sister the Auror at her back.

Tina wasn’t here. She had said she would be, and she wasn’t.

But Grindelwald was.

He sat Queenie down, fixed her a cup of tea with lots of sugar (“for the shock,” he’d said, with a little sideways smile), and he had told her things. He had done more than that. He had opened up his mind to her, so that she could see that the things he was telling her were true. Grindelwald had the Sight, and he had tricks to make it stronger. He had seen a war coming like the wave that drowned Atlantis, that would sweep them all away if it was not dammed now. He told her he could do that, and believed it; he told her what else he could do, and he believed all of that too. “We can rewrite the rules of our world, Queenie, if we are brave enough to try,” he said, and maybe he didn’t mean to show her or maybe he did, but he’d said those words before to a boy he loved, and he still believed in them even if the boy he’d loved did not.

His mind was a clicking, whirring, terrifying thing, and he did not once tell Queenie a lie. It was only later that Queenie realised that he could lie to himself so well it became true in his head.

Grindelwald’s followers believed too, the way that a preacher’s flock believed, all rabid for his touch of salvation. Queenie had stood among them and felt herself coming loose from her moorings, and she had let it happen.

By the time Jacob found her, Queenie was already gone.

*

_it’s a street full of strangers, and there’s a man who walks toward you, who looks into your eyes and promises the world as if it is already his to give_

and it’s Queenie’s eyes opening. It was the same man, but not the same face he had shown her. She had thought she was alone, but Credence had let her see that.

“He didn’t tell me about a war,” Credence said. “He didn’t need to, of course. He thought I was a stupid little Squib, easy bought.”

He spoke as if they were still on the roof, and Queenie had a dizzying moment when she wondered if they  _were_ and the five days she thought had passed in between had been nothing more than a fade-away into someone else’s memory. But no, she was in the corridor outside Credence’s room. She could not remember how she had come to be there.

“What is he doing to you?” Credence asked quietly.

Queenie put her hands over her face. “It’s me,” she said. “It’s – what I am. He didn’t make me do anything. He doesn’t, he doesn’t have to. This is what I  _am._ ” Her voice began to rise despite her best efforts, the brittle edge of a wail. Credence made some sort of frantic noise, probably trying to shut her up, and she pressed a hand hard against her mouth, hard enough to feel her own teeth.

They ended up in the tower again. Credence liked it there, and it was Credence deciding where they went, guiding Queenie by the arm. She took deep breaths of icy air and looked up at the sky, mildly surprised to see it was black, strewn with the brilliance of stars.

“He’s doing something to you,” Credence whispered in her ear, with only the mountains close enough to hear them. “I can tell.”

Queenie felt her arm judder in his grip.  _How do you know?_ She didn’t realise she had not spoken aloud until Credence’s eyes lit up, like she’d done something wonderful.

_I don’t know how to do magic, but I know how it feels. There’s something wrong around you._

_But that’s me, what’s wrong is_ me _._

_That magic isn’t coming from you._ _It’s around you. You really can’t feel it? It doesn’t hurt? It looks like it would hurt._

Queenie lifted her hands to his face, as if she could not trust her eyes and had to test her way through touch, as if his truth would be revealed under her fingers. Or maybe she just couldn’t bear it any more, to be so cold, to touch no one day after day. Credence bent his neck and they stood there, forehead to forehead, as the shivering set in.

“Everything hurts,” she whispered, and felt his sigh against her face, like he had been waiting a long time to hear that, like she had reached through the darkness in his head and taken out the words that weighed heaviest on his tongue.  _Everything always hurts._

_I chose to come here,_ Queenie said.  _I left Tina behind. We said we’d always look out for each other, and I left her in Paris, I left her alone._

_I did much worse than that,_ Credence breathed. He showed her what he’d done, the bodies in the ruins of the church, the little girl abandoned.  _Modesty is terrified of me now, she screamed when she saw me. I’m the monster in her nightmares._

It was terrible, unbearable and true, all true. Queenie stroked the tears from Credence’s face and discovered they were really her own.  He was a monster and so was she; this was a house of monsters. But the grief was tru e as well . And the hate was true, aimed at the man downstairs who had appointed himself king, prophet, ringmaster.

_You don’t have to stay here,_ Credence said.  _You can get out. You can go._

_But you can’t,_ Queenie said and that was true  too  without her knowing why. He was going to tell her why, and he mustn’t. She covered his mouth with both her hands.  _It’s not safe to give me a secret. He might hear_ _it_ _._

There was already enough truth up here to slit both their throats.

*

They had been in the castle for months. Queenie had grown used to being cold all the time, but had not lost her sweet tooth. She took a canister of Rosier’s expensive coffee and transfigured it into cocoa, made two generous cups and sat waiting for Credence, who slipped into the room like a shadow a few minutes later. He paused, looking at the cup that was clearly meant for him, and sat down. He sipped.

“It’s so sweet,” he said, sounding astonished.

“Sure as hell is,” Queenie agreed.  Credence wanted to tell her something; the wanting had brought her into the kitchen and brought on this craving for chocolate, so it was probably bad news.

_There’s going to be a trip. Into Germany, just me and him. He won’t tell me much about it._ Credence put down his cup.  _Can I ask you a question?_

_Of course you can._

_I wanted to know…did you ever meet the real Mr Graves?_

It was about as left field as it could have been. Queenie had to scramble to figure out who he meant, and transmitted the thought like a question of her own: a mental image of the Percival Graves she had known from the corridors of MACUSA, dark-browed and solemn as his own name. Handsome, if you liked that kind of thing, and didn’t mind the fact he was definitely married to the job. Tina had revered him as the Auror ideal, had shadowed him eagerly every time she got the chance. Graves had occasionally noticed her, and by extension the sister she had introduced to him; it was his job to notice things and not quite forget them, even if he never had cause to think about them again.

_I just wondered,_ Credence said,  _what he’d have done. If it was him I’d met._

_He’d have Obliviated you,_ Queenie said with certainty, and felt Credence’s mental  flinch .  _But I guess it depends on what you’d done to get his attention. If he’d thought you had wizarding blood, Squib or not, he might have felt responsible for you. Tina thought so, anyway. She knew him a lot better than I did._

_Why would he feel responsible for me?_ Credence asked. His shoulders had gone high and tense as he waited on her answer. Queenie wondered what it was he was afraid to hear.

_Because…you were there, honey, in New York, under his eye. Because it was his job to keep all of us safe, and if he didn’t care about anything else in the world, he cared about that._

_Did you trust him? To keep you safe?_

Queenie had never thought about it that way, not for herself.  _I trusted him with Tina,_ she said. She felt an echo of Credence’s understanding, what it meant to worry about a sister, to try to keep her safe, to let her down. He had done it twice over, and then once more with the woman who had become like a sister in the cages of the circus. Only he had not exactly left Nagini behind.

He should not have let her see that. But there it was anyway.

“Come back,” Queenie said tightly.

Credence leaned forward, took her hand and brought it up to press against the side of his head. She felt the darkness inside pressing back.

“Come with me,” he said.


End file.
